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Recently I spoke at Design Exchange Nottingham about playful UX. I’ve had a long standing interest in games as well as professional career in UX and I thought I’d talk about how they inform each other. Plus if all else failed I might get some people interested in some new games.

But I thought I’d write up my notes as well since SlideShare wasn’t playing nicely with Keynote.

Introduction

The intention of my talk is to look at what we can learn about UX from games, what they can learn from UX and whether games can make us better designers.

Learning from Games

The first game I talked about was Monument Valley.

Monument Valley

Monument Valley is a great mobile puzzle game that won the best iPad game in 2014. It had about 2.5 million downloads, before it was mentioned on House of Cards. It has a loose narrative and a beautiful clean art style.

When talking about user experience in the real world, architects create some of the most interested spaces and experiences, such as these:

Tverrfjellhytta – Norweigian Wild Reindeer Pavillion by SNØHETTA

When we consider architecture in games, we are often talking about level design, whether it is the more traditional Victorian London or a more fantastical setting. But level design is the physical system setting for gameplay and often a key factor in designing your experience.